No Useless Leniency

For it is the duty of the good man to teach others the good that you could not work because of the malignity of the times or of fortune, so that when many are capable of it, someone of them more loved by heaven will be able to work it.

Thursday, 22 May 2014

Alfred Jarry's Supermale (1902) is another of those fantasies of the fusion of the human with the machine, but also of the competition between the 'human forces' ('Ha, ha, human forces!') and the emergent forces of the machine. Andre Marcueil, the (anti-)hero is a veritable sex machine, or love machine. He is the supermale in all senses, including the most obvious one.

He is out to prove his statement 'The act of love is of no importance, since it can be performed indefinitely'. He can also outrun, on a bike with no chain, both a racing locomotive and its competitor - a 5 man racing bike, with the men fed on 'perpetual motion food.'

This could be another of those 'modernist' male fantasies of mastery (sexual and technological) we have, supposedly, abandoned. It seems the most extreme, if comic, statement of 'technological vitalism', literalised as a sex scene. Yet the scene of fantasy is one dominated by Ellen Elson, the railway heiress, who desires an 'Indian', an ever virile male.

She exhaust the supermale on her own, without the use of the 'reserve' prostitutes, and faints rather than dying - unlike one of the unfortunate bike riders, who dies in (literal) harness, but keep pedalling, or even the supermale, who dies fused to an electromagnetic 'love machine' at the climax (pun intended) of the book. The supermale overpowers the machine with his virility, but the result is that it melts into his head (it is something like the 'cap' from an electric chair) and drives him mad and kills him. Jarry's visions of male fusion are both competative and deadly.

Elson herself is another male fantasy, but perhaps not exhausted by that status. Jarry's comic vision explodes a mastery of technology, explodes the 'accelerationist' fantasy, without simply disregarding technology (as Deleuze makes clear).

Monday, 10 March 2014

In
this manner we enlisted irrevocably in the Devil’s party – the “historical evil”
that leads existing conditions to their destruction, the “bad side” that makes
history by undermining all established satisfaction.

Jean-Marc Mandosio's In the Cauldron of the Negative (2003) reflects on the tensions in the Situationist International between Raoul Vaneigem, as representative of the "party of life" (Nietzsche), and Guy Debord as representative of the "devil's party." Mandosio critiques Vangeim's "affirmative" vision, which runs from an over-heated embrace of the potentials of technology to a mystical-vitalist inverted Schopenhaurism. Read through the prism of alchemy Mandosio traces the "impossible" dream of qualitative transformation that founders on the rocks of actuality.

The text usefullly signals again the SI's embrace of some of the most extreme forms of capitalist technology as sites that can be detourned to communist ends. These include the technologies of conditioning, even brain-washing, that have been turned to maintaining the spectacle. Asger Jorn writes of the "race between free artists and the police to experiment with and develop the use of new techniques of conditioning." (which recalls Brecht and the Soviet avant-garde).

Mandosio quotes a text by Eduardo Rothe, from issue 12 of the SI's journal, which claims that although space travel is the expression, par excellence, of capitalist alienation, in the future: "We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as
“volunteers” of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their
domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers councils."

This is the "accelerationist" tendency of the SI. It maintains the split of productive forces from relations of production and claims the capacity to reuse them, evincing a faith in the forms of automation leading to the possibility of a Fourierist utopia. Nature can be "pillaged" as long as it's by workers councils.

In Mandosio's account, which seems convincing, this tendency splits into two. In the case of Vaneigem it leads to a displacement of these technological powers onto mysticism and the "will to life." In the case of Debord, partly under the impact of ecological thinking, into a deepening consideration of the negative. The present taste for Vaneigem, as in Howard Caygill's On Resistance (2013), indicates the generalised desire for a power of will to break the forms of domination that characterise the present moment.

The path of Debord is less taken, except perhaps by me, but is also not immune from a detachment from the present and an inscription of the will in the negative. Debord's desire to go by the bad side does not simply lead to pessimism, in the usual characterisation, but also detachment.

That Mandosio ends on a salutary Leopardian pessimism is a sign of the difficulty, although at least honest. What interests me is how the "adventure" of the SI maps a series of possibilities that remain the coordinates for the present moment, even if this is in a largely "occult" fashion. Rather than remain mired in debates about recuperation, academic or otherwise, it might be worth considering this "framing" as a means to inquire into our present moment.

Sunday, 10 November 2013

In Reading Capital (1968) Althusser argues
that we cannot rest content with the insight that there exist different forms
or rhythms of time to undermine the linear time of historicism and capital. He
argues that, in addition to different forms of visible time, there are invisible times. In particular we cannot
read capitalist time ‘in the flow of any given process’, because this is an invisible
time that is ‘essentially illegible, as invisible and as opaque as the reality
of the total capitalist production process itself.’ (RC 112) Such a time is
only accessible in its concept, and
this is a concept which must be constructed’
(RC 113).

This would seem to leave the ‘lived
time’ of capital, its relation to the biological, as only ideological – a
receding moment that we cannot grasp outside of a discourse of science. If we
return to For Marx, and in particular
the essay ‘The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht’ (FM 129-151), then we
can consider this a phenomenology, even in the Hegelian sense,[1]
of our access to ‘invisible time’ (so, Reading
Capital would then be equivalent to Hegel’s Logic). Althusser’s essay explores three modes of time that are
staged in the play. He begins from ‘the co-existence of a long, slowly-passing,
empty time and a lightning-short, full time’ (FM 134) in the play: between
scenes of mass characters going about everyday life – the time of the chronicle
– and the sudden intrusion at the end of each act of the three central
characters (Nina, her father, and her lover) – the time of tragedy. This would
seem to instantiate also a Benjaminian contrast between ‘empty, homogeneous
time’ and ‘now-time’ (Jetztzeit),
especially as this second form of full time, according to Althusser, ‘is a
dialectical time par excellence.’ (FM
137)

The essay, however, disputes this
identification. The tragic time of encounter, dialectical time, is, in fact,
the melodramatic timeof the father of the central character. We have not
passed from ideological time to non-ideological time, but to another form of ideology. While
dialectical time is pushed to the margins, this dialectical time is a time
dictated by the father, who wishes to save his daughter’s honour from her
lover-cum-pimp. It is melodramatic. ‘Sheltered from the world, it unleashes all
the fantastic form of a breathless conflict which can only ever find peace in
the catastrophe of someone else’s fall: it takes this hullabaloo for destiny
and its breathlessness for the dialectic.’ (FM 140) This is still the dialectic
of consciousness and ‘And that is why its destruction is the precondition for
any real dialectic.’ (FM 138)

The third form of time is only
indicated when Nina abandons her father – who has murdered her lover – to
embrace the life of (presumably) a prostitute. ‘Father, consciousness,
dialectic, she throws them all overboard and crosses the threshold of the other
world’ (FM 140) This rejection of the false dialectic of consciousness is
parallel to Marx’s gesture in Capital
and to Brecht’s theatre. It is the emergence of a true knowledge. It requires
the rejection of consciousness to pass into an ‘experience’ of time, which is
to say capitalist time, as it is – in its naked dominance.

***

I now want
to turn to contemporary reflections or endorsements of accelerationism as a
site that replicates this tension of the attempt to trace a phenomenology of
capitalist time. What we could call ‘classical accelerationism’, associated
with the work of Nick Land, involved the endorsement of capitalist time as a
time of acceleration, in the form of expanding value and the absorption of all
elements of life under an ‘inhuman’ marketization (Land 2013). It is the
acceleration of this vector that will, it is claimed, pierce the wall of
capitalism itself an usher in a radically new future that has, in Land’s
reading, already occurred. We are infiltrated from the future, by guerrillas of
this technological and cybernetic mobilization of flows.

Contemporary accelerationism
modulates this schema (I will be referring to the work of Alex Williams, Nick
Srnicek and Mark Fisher). It concludes that we have been robbed of our future
by an inertial and crisis-ridden neoliberalism that has rescinded the dynamism
of capitalism for the opaque mechanisms of speculative finance. The
phenomenology of this experience of capitalist time is provided by dance music.
Once, in this story, dance music provided an inventive form of musical
accelerationism. In Mark Fisher’s characterization, ‘While 20th
Century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which
made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st
Century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.’ Whereas once, in the 1990s, there was a ‘hardcore continuum’ that had guaranteed an experimental acceleration (from rave to jungle to
early grime), today, adopting Simon Reynolds diagnosis of ‘Retromania’, that
future has stalled in bad pastiche (Williams 2013). Our moment is a nostalgia
for a future that was once promised (‘Today is the Tomorrow you were Promised
Yesterday’, in Victor Burgin’s phrase). Retromania is, in Alex Williams’s
formulation, the ‘pop-cultural logic of late neoliberalism’.

The stasis of neo-liberalism, which
concludes the only way into the future is more of the same, is mimicked by a
plundering of the past to grab images and forms of acceleration that reappear
as merely static moments. We live, in Alex Williams’s Ballardian coinage, a chronosickness (2013). Unable to accede
to the future, or even a faith or belief in the future, we instead can only
live out the blockage of our present
moment.

This is evident in Mark Fisher’s recent discussion of juke / footwork – a form of Chicago ‘ghetto house’ at
155-165 bpm, with repetitive and often aggressive sampling (‘Fuck Dat’). It
would seem that footwork continues the hardcore continuum and instantiates
another acceleration, which would dispute the accelerationist characterization
of the present moment as a moment of stasis. To rescue this diagnosis, Fisher
argues that while jungle ‘was dark, but also wet, viscous, and enveloping’,
footwork is ‘strangely desiccated’. This illiquid form traces its
resistance ‘in the bad infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering,
frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.’
If jungle was predictive of accelerative temporalities the
footwork, according to Fisher, only captures the impasses of the present
moment.

***

The answer of
‘classical accelerationism’ to this dilemma is more acceleration through
celebration of the speed of
capitalism. When jungle embodied the ‘Landian imaginary’ of ‘apocalyptic
paranoid euphoria’ this made possible a future (Williams 2013). The present
moment rescinds that promise and so contemporary accelerationism no longer
works on the ‘speed’ of capitalism, which is not present, but seeks another
form of time. Lacking this ‘alienating temporality’ (Williams 2013), speed only
replicates capitalist parameters. To push beyond them we need to play off
acceleration against speed, against ‘a simple brain-dead onrush’ (Williams
2013), we are called to a new ‘universal field’ of accelerative possibilities.
This future is predicated, for Alex Williams (2013), in the engagement with
‘the forward-propelling energies embodied in the best of UK race music, its
posthuman ingenuity, alien sonic vocabulary, and its manipulation of affect and
impersonal desire.’

I leave to one side the nationalism
of this agenda (seemingly an endemic feature of music writing in the UK,
usually in regard to an inferiority complex in relation to US-music). The
example of footwork I’ve just discussed points to a problem with this agenda:
the lack of any instantiation of ‘acceleration’ in the present moment. The
‘possibilities’ that contemporary accelerationism promises to trace in a
universal field slip, unpleasantly, into another form of retromania. This is
another form of nostalgia, but a retooled nostalgia that castigates the present
in the name of encrypted possibilities that remain largely invisible.

In the Althusserian terms I sketched
I would argue that this figuration of capitalist temporality is melodramatic.
It implies that at the edge of the present – dominated by the empty time of the
chronicle – is the occasional flash of melodramatic dialectical time. These
flashes are, however, largely sent from the past. For all its proclamations of
a knowledge of the present and future, accelerationism does not accede to the
abandonment of this ‘full’ time of the clash. What are lacking, ironically, are
precisely the new aesthetic forms, the new modes of knowledge, which
accelerationism is premised upon.

Contemporary
accelerationism remains perched precariously in the present moment, between a
valorized past and a receding future. This is disjunction without synthesis. Again, it registers our broken relation to capitalist time, but only in the mystification
we can reconnect to a superior force. Althusser insisted that it was the absence of relations that marked the
temporal experience of capitalism for consciousness. My objection to
accelerationism is not on the ground of absence, but on the promise of
reconnection.

***

Even discussing accelerationism might be considered a
waste of (your) time. This is especially true of a critical discussion. What
interests me, however, is accessing the question of the knowledge of capitalist
time.Accelerationism promises the kind
of exposure of capitalist time that marks Althusser’s real dialectic. It premises
itself on the stripping away of consciousness, which is not now the result of
capitalism’s practical anti-humanism, but rather of epistemic expansion and
extended ‘rationality’. What I am suggesting is that it falls back from this
into mere melodrama, and that it positions such a real dialectic as a
melodramatic form.

Of
course it could be said, in line with Althusser, that knowledge of capitalist
time is simply a matter for a critique of political economy and a
reconstruction of the logic of capitalism, beyond human consciousness. What
interests me is the registration and shaping of these experiences on and for
consciousness, which does not simply disappear – except in Althusserian science
or the accelerationist dream of inhuman knowledge. This implies, to me, a
necessity to think the disconnection and impasse of the present moment as a
figure, at least potentially, of consciousness. In this case our choice, or
decision, of aesthetic figuration becomes a crucial mode of knowledge.

Williams,
Alex, ‘Back to the Future? Technopolitics and the legacy of the CCRU’, Berlin,
1 February 2013.

[1] In Gillian Rose’s
summary: ‘Hegel’s text invites us to witness the education of natural
consciousness, presented as a series of confrontations set in more or less
recognizable historical settings: between two opposed individual
consciousnesses, between opposed forces residing within a single consciousness,
and between opposed forces belonging to the same communal consciousness.’ (6)

Saturday, 9 November 2013

Institute of English Studies,
Senate House, University of London (8 November 2013)

The ‘Old Weird’ could be seen to be
characterized by a notably dubious, not to say toxic, politics. H.P. Lovecraft’s
racism is an obvious case – ‘the polyglot abyss’ of The Horror at Red Hook (1925) demonstrating the synthesis of racial
panic and cosmic horror. We could also mention that Arthur Machen, when asked
by the editors of Authors Take Sides
for his views on the Spanish Civil War in 1937, was one of five authors who
supported Franco, writing: ‘Arthur Machen begs to inform you that he is, and
always has been, entirely for Franco.’ Algernon Blackwood, in his short story
‘Adventures of a Private Secretary’ (1906), has the character of an ‘old Jew’
with ‘an air of obsequious insolence’ (this is one of the milder slurs), called
Marx (!).[1]
Penguin’s decision to reprint the story in a volume of Blackwood’s Selected Tales in 1943 defies reasoned
comment. Beyond personal politics I think we can also hazard a literary
politics of the Old Weird that often rests on a sense of racial or political
anxiety or threat.

The
‘New Weird’, in obvious contrast, has a politics that is often much more to the
Left. Beyond the obvious example of China Miéville, I would like to note a more
general tendency to a cultural politics of loving the alien. The Weird is not
seen as simply some terrible threat, but only a threat when perceived as such
from within social constraints. The monstrous or Weird is to be celebrated for
its expansion of consciousness and erosion of the bourgeois ego – the latter exemplified,
often, by Lovecraft’s uptight ‘heroes’.[2]

Grant
Morrison’s short story ‘Lovecraft in Heaven’ exemplifies this turn by rewriting
the ‘Old Weird’ into the ‘New Weird’.[3]
Lovecraft is dying of cancer and Morrison considers the self-replicating
monstrosity of cancer as the physical embodiment of both Lovecraft’s creatures
and his fear of the feminine (the ‘cuntworld’ as Morrison puts it[4]).
Lovecraft’s positivist rationalism makes him unable to embrace the chaotic and
fractal. In conversation with his fictional creation Professor George Angell
Lovecraft states: ‘I have come here to confirm my belief that the World of
Reason still holds dominion over the primeval depths of the human imagination.’
Angell replies that Lovecraft is ‘quite naïve’ and that, in fact, ‘Reason is
the flimsy mask on the face of Chaos’. Lovecraft’s rejoinder is ‘Then our whole
world is a nightmare.’ ‘Only if you fear it’, is Angell’s reply. Angell starts
to breakdown verbally and physically, saying ‘we must embrace them … integrate
them’.[5]
The story ends with Lovecraft being opened like a door, not into Hell, as Lovecraft
supposes, but into Heaven.[6]
This is the DeleuzoGuattarian Weird – in their preference for Lovecraft’s Dunsanian
trips to his cosmic horror,[7]
or the Levinasian weird of alterity and its integration.

World
of Horror

What I want to consider here is a form
of the ‘New Weird’ that embraces or integrates the toxic politics of certain
strains of the Old Weird; this is the work of Manchester-based publishers Savoy
and, most notably, their creation Lord Horror. Horror is a fictionalised
reworking of wartime broadcaster for the Nazi’s William Joyce, nicknamed Lord
Haw-Haw and executed for treason in 1946. The works deliberately, rather than
unconsciously, toy with anti-Semitism, racism, and, in the figure of La Squab,
paedophilic desire for the ‘fille fatale’. To be clear from the start I am not
celebrating or endorsing this turn or self-conscious return to the politically
toxic. These works disturb me profoundly, which is why I want to consider them
as an outlier of contemporary Weird fiction.

The
world of Savoy and the world of Lord Horror is a multi-media platform. Lord
Horror has appeared in novels (Lord
Horror (1989), Motherfuckers: The
Auschwitz of Oz (1996), Baptised in
the Blood of Millions (2001), Invictus
Horror (2013)), graphic novels or comics (Lord Horror series (1-7) (1989-1990) Reverbstorm 8-14 (1994-2000) (2012)), music, film, and criticism (Horror Panegyric (2008)). He also has
sidekicks, in the form of Meng & Ecker (The
Adventures of Meng & Ecker (1997)), and spin-off characters, such as La
Squab (daughter of Meng) (La Squab
(2012)).[8]
The result is a ‘universe’ or mythos, somewhere between Lovecraft and the
comic-book worlds of publishers like DC or Marvel. This dispersion gives a
paradoxical consistency to Lord Horror as – like one of his models, Michael Moorcock’s
Jerry Cornelius – he moves between times and formats. For reasons of brevity
and economy today I want to focus on his appearance within the graphic novel Reverbstorm.

Reverbstorm was a continuation of the
first 7 Lord Horror comics and it
appeared in 8 issues from 1994-2000. In 2012 these issues were collected
together in one graphic novel, with an added final issue. David Britton is the
writer, with the main artist being John Coulthart and additional art provided
by Kris Guidio, while Michael Butterworth is the editor. The earlier Lord Horror comics, written by Michael
Butterworth and drawn by Kris Guidio had initially been more ‘postmodern’ in
their playing with comic conventions and comic characters the tone shifts
dramatically in Reverbstorm. Now
drawn primarily by John Coulthart the density of the art, the decline in the
words, and the movement to a thoroughgoing engagement with modernist
aesthetics, produces something slightly less immediately confrontational but
certainly more strange.

The
shift began with John Coulthart’s work for Lord
Horror 5 – a series of full page images of an imaginary Auschwitz with
empty white text squares. Coulthart describes this as a ‘unique conjunction of
Holocaust architecture and Weird Fiction.’[9]
In fact Coulthart drew on and reworked an earlier image from his The Call of Cthulhu adaptation of R’lyeh
to figure this imaginary camp. Obviously this is a shocking violation of the
refusal of representation of the Holocaust and, even more provocatively, this
violation melds the camps with the pulp world of Weird Fiction. It also opens
to an architectural or spatial vision of the weird, which I now want to
explore.

Spatial
Dialectics

Just as the distinction between the
latent and manifest contents of the dream had ceased to be valid, so had any
division between the real and the super-real in the external world. Phantoms
slid imperceptibly from nightmare to reality and back again, the terrestrial
and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable, as they had been at
Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Golgotha and Gomorrah.

The world of horror is now disconnected
directly from the world of William Joyce – that of the 1920s, 30s and the war –
displaced into a ‘future’ setting of Torenbürgen (the ‘unreal city’), or what
Coulthart calls ‘Lord Horror’s vicious dreamscape of fascist atrocity’.[11]
Lord Horror is living with Jessie Matthews (modelled on the English dancer,
singer and actress of the 1920s and 30s). Matthews is a rock star, credited
with reintroducing reverb into popular music, while Lord Horror defends her
against anti-Semitic slurs and joins her on stage to sing. Horror is joined by
his ‘brother’ James Joyce.

Horror
still broadcasts a mixture of rock and roll with cut-ups of William Joyce on
his radio show ‘Amerikkka’s war in the ether’ on Radio Reich Rund Funk. As
Michael Paraskos notes in his review for The
Spectator (!), ‘it is difficult to outline a clear narrative thread’.[12]
His suggestion that the images represent Benjamin’s wreckage of history, quoted
at the beginning of Reverbstorm, is
astute. For Coulthart ‘Reverbstorm throws these numerous influences out like a
dark prism, flashing broken images of refracted black light’.[13]
I want to suggest this image practice inhabits something like what Fredric
Jameson calls a ‘spatial dialectics’.[14]
In Reverbstorm temporality has
collapsed, or been collapsed, and instead we have the spatial play of fragments
which are, pace Eliot, not ‘shored against my ruins’.[15]

These
fragments are the ruin; organised within the frame they are brought into
contact to generate the weird effect. For Lovecraft modernism was conceived of
under the sign of horror. When we encounter R’lyeh, in The Call of Cthulhu:

Without knowing what
futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of
the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he
dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces – surfaces
too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious
with horrible images and hieroglyphs.[16]

Torenbürgen is horrific, but also a
space of modernism – a butchered modernism. This is Eliotic modernism with the
anti-Semitism amplified and embodied. To ‘read’ or ‘view’ this non-narrative
space is to engage with a difficult act of extracting meaning and reference
while also attending to the clash and emptying of meaning.

Integrate
That

I have drawn a contrast between the
dubious politics of the old weird and the politics of acceptance and
integration of the monstrous of the new weird. While I have suggested Savoy’s Lord Horror is an outlier to the new
weird paradigm I’d also like to end by noting that it does produce a work of
integration. In this case, as I’ve previously argued, what we are called to
integrate is ‘fascinating (British) fascism’: the politics of William Joyce,
the pre- and post-war politics of Oswald Mosley, and the anti-Semitism and
racism that runs through certain strands of modernism.[17]
This is integration in the mode of disintegration, in which fascism, Nazism and
racism are coded through and as the Weird – also activating the dubious
politics of the Weird as well.

Obviously
we can note at least two problems with this strategy. The first is the problem
Perry Anderson identified with post-structuralism: the randomization of
history. Rather than generating the tension or contradiction of a dialectic
this spatial arrangement of images and signifiers merely serves to mix-up and
even neutralise the ‘charge’ of the toxic materials it plays with. The result
is not so much a force-field, but rather a slackening of tension. The second,
inverse, problem is that this integration and neutralization servers a jouissance – a pained ‘enjoyment’ – that
reactivates the toxic core as aesthetic option. Far from challenging the
fascination of fascism this ‘weird fascism’ integrates the toxic core as
‘attractive’ possibility.

In
some ways the point is that we can’t simply immunise ourselves against these
problems or possibilities. The final issue of the graphic novel concerns, in
its text, the disintegration of Lord Horror as his insides push out through his
skin. This terminal collapse involves reprising the key image elements, under
the pressure that refuses to integrate. The tension of this (dis)integrative
moment remains and, I should say, never fails to disturb me. So, I’m not simply
recommending a return to the malignant politics of some of the Old Weird
writers. Instead, I’m interested in how this malignant politics feeds the
horror element of the Weird and how Savoy’s return to this malignant politics
puts the contemporary Weird under pressure. This, I think, is the tension of
our moment.

[2] This model is, in
fact, figured in Lovecraft’s own fiction. In his story ‘The Whisperer in
Darkness’ (1931) one character, who has had his brain transferred into a metal
cylinder by the Fungi from Yuggoth (!), claims ‘‘What I had thought morbid and shameful
and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious – my previous estimate being
merely a phase of man’s eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.’ (193)